greenduck

I feel like I should leave these here:

Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Association: 1-800-662-HELP

National Suicide Prevention Helpline: 1-800-273-TALK

Free Crisis Text Helpline: 741-741

Trevor project Helpline (crisis intervention specialized in LGBT issues) : 1-866-488-7386

> Hundreds of thousands of doctoral students investing huge amounts of time and money to chase a relatively tiny pool of prestigious teaching and research positions.

That's a pretty cynical take on academia. There are plenty of good reasons to go for a PhD that don't amount to prestige chasing and it isn't accurate to view PhD programs as a jobs training program to push you into academia similar to a coding bootcamp, but longer and more expensive.

The experience of learning research by generating new knowledge with the top experts in your field is intrinsically valuable even if you don't use it every day. The one high school teacher I had who had done her PhD was by far the best teacher at the whole school. Everyone benefits from having a more educated society. Plus, most PhDs are funded. That money doesn't get thrown on a fire. It is paid for by the student teaching undergrads (which is a huge profit driver for universities if you need a selfish reason to support PhDs) and then is turned around into research which benefits society. Most PhDs don't end up going back into academia either. In fact the profit from cheap teaching assistants in the form of PhD students is probably the biggest driver of getting more of them at the university level, not some sort of academic circle jerk. Universities just want money.

Hard disagree. Whatever magic they had back when I spent time on there is gone and it isn't coming back anytime soon. They've been overrun by neo-nazi circle jerking as nazi's have been excised from other platforms.

I am not getting my hopes up until all of the ballots are counted. Even then, there will be a few legal fights (hopefully easy wins, but still).

That's not an argument against e-voting, but rather the election media circus and craziness of the electoral college. With e-voting you get the complexity of both.

> relies on the words of "spooky experts telling [them] what to believe".

Widespread distrust of subject matter experts already exists in the US. You can't just tell people to shut up and listen to the experts.

The efficacy of vaccines is one of those things that is almost impossible for the average person to verify. I can get in a plane and confirm for myself that it doesn't fall out of the sky. I can't get a vaccine and directly compare it with my chances of catching the flu without one. That's the reason why people widely trust the safety of planes, but there exists an anti-vax movement in the US.

Even with alternatives to first past the post, the complexity is of a wildly different scale than blockchain. I can sit down with someone and go step by step how ranked-choice works right now without looking up material. I'd have to pull out reference material and then start with the basics of hash functions or something to explain blockchain.

Science and engineering don't care if people believe in them or not.

If people don't believe the results of an election, then it is de facto illegitimate.

Expanding on what katbyte said, the Hays code was adopted by every major studio in the US to replace state run censors. They did this because of the same battle going on right now in social media: "if we self regulate, then we won't need government regulation placed on us." When an entire industry agrees to follow the code and has enforcement options available and does it with the threat of government action if they don't follow it, the only difference between it and a real law are the name. The consequences to ignoring it were that your funding was dropped, the offending scenes were removed from the film, or you were kicked out and blacklisted from the industry. They were apparently pretty strict about it. You can tell that by how stringently it was followed for decades.

Maybe it's field specific. In my subfield of physics, I've collaborated with three other groups across the US without any fear of people running off with our work.